Email Archiving for Compliance

Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server 1.1
Among the mail archiving products I looked at, Mimosa NearPoint for Microsoft Exchange Server 1.1 has a unique architecture that makes it more of an Exchange backup and recovery solution than an archiving solution. While most of the other products use Messaging API (MAPI) to get Exchange data, NearPoint uses the Exchange Extensible Storage Engine (ESE) backup APIs to actually copy all Exchange data to the NearPoint server on initial install. NearPoint then sets up a scheduled task to process the transaction logs and keep the NearPoint server up to date.

Once this Exchange shadowing is set up, NearPoint can archive mailboxes' content to reduce their size. This results in three versions of a mailbox: the "live" one in Exchange, an archived version in NearPoint that contains messages removed from the live mailbox, and a historical, or backup, copy in NearPoint. The historical copy can represent the mailbox at any point in time since NearPoint was configured to manage it.

Archiving policy support is limited to archiving based on message size and/or date or archiving mailboxes that have reached a specified percentage of their capacity. You can't archive messages based on their content.

Because NearPoint backs up the entire IS in addition to maintaining an archive of deleted messages, the NearPoint server requires storage in the amount of 250 to 350 percent of your current Exchange storage. This storage can be low cost (e.g., Serial ATA—SATA drives) because it's accessed only by the NearPoint extraction and recovery processes. Indexes and metadata are stored in SQL Server. Extracted messages and their attachments are stored on the file system; each unique attachment is stored only once, no matter how many people have received it.

Like Symantec Enterprise Vault, NearPoint provides a seamless experience in both Outlook and Microsoft Outlook Web Access (OWA), retrieving the full message from the NearPoint server when a user opens a stub message and presenting it in the original format. You can search data in NearPoint from an Outlook folder or a NearPoint Web page, as Figure 5 shows. The Web page also allows users to browse mailboxes in the same folder structure as Outlook's. The browse feature lets an administrator, or user with the appropriate rights, view a mailbox as it looked yesterday or last month. According to Mimosa, NearPoint 1.2 provides offline access to archived messages.

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